The Mirage PC

It took eight months of design and planning, plus a fully functional prototype to finish this case: A completely custom-made acrylic cube that holds a water-cooled PC on one side, and a water-cooled Mac on the other.

It’s the best of both worlds; Nvidia and ATI, Mac and PC, Windows and Linux, all tied together with water-cooling and hand cut acrylic. This dual motherboard case allows me to run a dedicated Linux server on one side, and play in that server on the other! At one point during the building process, I worked non-stop 16-hour shifts every day for over three weeks! But the final outcome was well worth it. I initially drew a sketch of what I wanted the case to look like, then made revisions, roughed out some dimensions and went from there.

I ordered sheets of acrylic from my local plastics supply store, and began cutting away with my dremel and jigsaw. I decided to make a prototype case so I could work out any bugs I might encounter before my final product. I didn’t run into many problems with my prototype, and the final case came out great! For that case, I used a Pentium 4 system on the left, and a modded, water-cooled Xbox on the right!

Obviously, I made some changes for my final design, but I couldn’t have done it without testing everything out beforehand! For my final design, I decided to do the unthinkable: marry a PC and a Macintosh into the same case. And to add insult to injury, I installed Gentoo Linux on both systems, and clustered them together into one super computer. Here are the details on both systems:

PC:

AMD Athlon FX-51 overclocked @ 2.6Ghz

1Gb of Corsair PC3200 Registered RAM TWINX1024R-3200C2

Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra overclocked @ 490/1200

Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer

Pioneer DVD Drive

MSI DragonWriter 40x12x48 CD-RW

Intel 64 bit PCI Ultra 160 SCSI adapter

Seagate 40 gig HDD

2 Seagate 160 gig SATA drives

4 18.3 gig Ultra 160 10k RPM SCSI drives

Vantec Ion power supply

Mac:

G4 400Mhz CPU

768mb PC133 memory

ATI Rage128 Pro

40 gig Seagate HDD

DVD Drive

Cendyne 12x CD-RW

Both systems are water-cooled with a custom-designed water and peltier cooling setup, running at 15 degrees under full load. The case houses three separate power supplies: one for the PC, Mac, and pump/peltier. All visible wires have been hidden behind the mirrored acrylic, an impossible feat with a regular acrylic case. Both motherboards, cards, and memory sticks have been etched (by hand) with UV reactive ink over the circuitry.

Also, all 4 CD drives have been stealthed, as well as the dual radiators and reservoirs. All 8 hard drives were lined up in a staircase layout, making up the front portion of the case. Along the front sits a series of red LED’s, wired up to a custom made LED pattern controller (which can be changed among eight different patterns). I also have three switches on the nose of my case that turn on the PC, the Mac, and my 4 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. The front of the case also houses two custom hand made switch arrays which control everything from my four UV and two red cathodes, to my functional tachometer (that redlines on CPU usage), to the red cathodes inside my monitor, and lastly to the four120mm red LED fans.

The top portion is also wired into the same pattern controller, but with the addition of one way mirrors to create an optical illusion of LED’s traversing off into infinity (when, in fact, they are only an inch thick!).

The mirrored flames were drawn and cut by hand with a dremel, along with all the other mirrored and clear acrylic pieces. Ironically, no machine work was done, as everything was designed, drawn, measured, cut, drilled, tapped, painted, and assembled by hand. I used a variety of tools and skills creating this case, but I am happy to say that I did all the work myself, and I gained a greater appreciation for my work because of that.

More images and videos of this case, and my other mods can be found on my Web site, Planet Overclock.

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